Artist Raven John is carving her own path and finding work as a professional in spaces that celebrate her Indigenous and two-spirit identity.

The term “two-spirit” is a way for LGBT Indigenous people to articulate a gender identity or sexual orientation that is connected to their culture and spirituality.

“Our sexual and gender orientations have more to do with our spiritual and cultural beliefs than simply being bisexual, homosexual or gender-fluid or gendervariant or trans-sexual,” John explains.

Bullied as a teenager, John never managed to finish high school. Now 28 years old, she’s graduated with a bachelor’s in fine arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is working on a certificate in Northwest Coast Jewellery Arts from the Native Education College.

She was a featured artist at the Queer Arts Festival this spring, and she’s now working on her second stop-motion animation film.

Speaking during a phone call before we met, John tells me: “It’s a dream come true, being able to work in film and make the unreal world real.”

Making her worldA few weeks later, I sat down with John in the college’s lunchroom. Her voice is calm and confident. She is wearing a turquoise and purple thin-strapped dress that she made herself.

As a kid, John says, she loved the fantasy dreamscapes in films such as “The Little Mermaid” and “Legend” (a dark fantasy film from the mid-’80s). Now an adult, she has turned toward stop-motion animation and was recruited to work for a local, Indigenous-owned, stop-motion animation company, Spotted Fawn Productions. There she creates sets and sculpts the faces of figurine-size characters.

A screenshot of a stop-motion film by Raven John. Photo courtesy Raven John

“With 3D and illustrated animation ... it still comes down to a flat image or digital image,” she explains, “whereas with stop-motion animation, you’re creating real things in real spaces and there’s a tactile nature to it that is just really alluring.”

Beyond artistic fulfillment, John says the production team offers her a safe, supportive space where her two-spirit identity is recognized.

“Where other productions aim to diversify their crew and programs, [this] company starts from a talented and diverse crew of women, queer-identified, Indigenous and people of color. There is no glass ceiling to break: We all come from a point of understanding and growth, each working to our strengths,” John says.

Pushing backBefore identifying as two-spirit, John identified as a pansexual woman. It was only after coming to embrace and accept her Coast Salish and Sto:lo identity that she adopted the term. Her decision to identify as two-spirit is one of the many ways she is resisting the racism that she has witnessed since a young age.

“I know a lot of the hatred I received and the bullying I received through high school was racialized, that it was because I was Native,” she says. “That was something that for the longest time I tried to ignore and separate myself from.

“I think attempting to be, or [to] act, colorblind is a coping mechanism that a lot of people use when they don’t know any other way of moving forward.”

When John was a teen, she distanced herself from cultural practices, she says, because she didn’t want to “draw further attention from bullies and racists.” She recalls turning down her family’s offer of teachings, explaining, “I did not want to wear my Native-ness.”

Aside from being public about her two-spirit identity, John is pushing back against racism and colonialism in other ways. She has led several workshops on the impact of residential schools, attended anti-fascist rallies where she handed out anti-Nazi buttons and has coordinated art workshops to Indigenous youth in rural areas outside Vancouver.

Make art, not war

“It’s been my goal to take up space in the public eye,” she says, “to show Indigenous youth that they can do what I’m doing — and that they can do much more.”

Her work with youth is a way to move forward and reckoning with her past. John says she wants a different future for Indigenous youth.

“For the rest of my life, I’m hoping to make art, and to continue to make art,” she says. “I plan on taking up spaces that future generations can see themselves in,” she says.

While her future is looking bright, John laments that when she was younger, she did not “think highly enough” of herself and did not believe that she could one day study art at university level. She also credits the barriers to her self-esteem as being due to the legal, institutionalized and social racism that she faced growing up.

“But seeing the cleverness and humor and talent in the youths from my communities in Hope, and in Mission, and Chilliwack, I know how far they can go, and that they can go much farther than me in their careers,” says John, noting that all they need is the support and opportunities she lacked in her youth.

“It’s been my goal to take up space in the public eye,” she says, “to show Indigenous youth that they can do what I’m doing — and that they can do much more.”